Background: Anther culture has advantage to obtain a homozygous progeny by induced doubling of haploid chromosomes and to improve selection efficiency for invaluable agronomical traits. Therefore, anther culturing is widely utilized to breed new varieties and to induce genetic variations in several crops including rice. Genome sequencing technologies allow the detection of a massive number of DNA polymorphism such as SNPs and Indels between closely related cultivars. These DNA polymorphisms permit the rapid identification of genetic diversity among cultivars and genomic locations of heritable traits. To estimate sequence diversity derived from anther culturing, we performed whole-genome resequencing of five Korean rice accessions, including three anther culture lines (BLB, HY-04 and HY-08), their progenitor cultivar (Hwayeong), and an additional japonica cultivar (Dongjin).
Results: A total of 1,165 × 106 raw reads were generated with over 58× coverage that detected 1,154,063 DNA polymorphisms between the Korean rice accessions and Nipponbare. We observed that in Hwayeong and its progenies, 0.64 SNP was found per one kb of Nipponbare genome, while Dongjin, bred by a conventional breeding method, had a lower number of SNPs (0.45 SNP/kb). Among 1,154,063 DNA polymorphisms, 29,269 non-synonymous SNPs located on 30,013 genes and these genes were functionally classified based on gene ontology (GO). We also analyzed line-specific SNPs which were estimated 1 ~ 3% of the total SNPs. The frequency of non-synonymous SNPs in each accession ranged from 26 SNPs in Hwayeong to 214 SNPs in HY-04.
Conclusions: The genetic difference we detected between the progenies derived from anther culture and their mother cultivar is due to somaclonal variation during tissue culture process, such as karyotype change, chromosome rearrangement, gene amplification and deletion, transposable element, and DNA methylation. Detection of genome-wide DNA polymorphisms by high-throughput sequencer enabled to identify sequence diversity derived from anther culturing and genomic locations of heritable traits. Furthermore, it will provide an invaluable resource to identify molecular markers and genes associated with diverse traits of agronomical importance.